{"id":2071,"date":"2012-10-26T07:56:12","date_gmt":"2012-10-26T11:56:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.synapse9.com\/signals\/?p=2071"},"modified":"2013-09-11T09:46:32","modified_gmt":"2013-09-11T14:46:32","slug":"mismeasures-steer-us-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/mismeasures-steer-us-wrong\/","title":{"rendered":"How mismeasures steer us wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"

10\/26\/12 in\u00a0Shining Light on \u201cDark Energy\u201d<\/a><\/strong>, part of my “reality math” series,\u00a0I describe how standard measures of business impacts vastly under-count them, and how it has equally<\/em><\/em> misled our theory and practices of\u00a0sustainable design. <\/em><\/p>\n

We’re not counting the consumption required to deliver business services at all, and that’s commonly much larger than the impacts we can trace directly. \u00a0 The article is in the <\/em>Sept 2012 SB “New Metrics of Sustainability<\/a>” letter (& here as a PDF<\/a>). \u00a0The research for it is <\/em><\/em>the peer reviewed 2011 <\/a>SEA assessment m<\/a>ethod<\/span><\/em> published in Sustainability (MDPI). \u00a0In discussing it <\/em><\/em>on Systems Thinking World I found good added ways to explain the huge problem it causes us. <\/em> <\/em>The graphic below shows the scale of the error, the typical four-fold under-count.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

But… Why Does the Changing Information Matter ???<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Loraine noted that if the same error of perception is the same for all, it might not matter, for example. \u00a0So, the problem that misinformation distorts every decision you make<\/strong> wasn’t getting through. \u00a0The question she asked help set up a good explanation.<\/em><\/p>\n

________<\/p>\n

10\/25\/12 Loraine \u2013 Thanks for inquiring. \u00a0\u00a0I do recognize there is something in my work that is hard to connect with.\u00a0\u00a0 Maybe its best exemplified by the weird quotes I get occasionally, like my dad\u2019s, the outstanding physics professor who taught me to be so observant I could recognize behavior not following the laws of physics. \u00a0\u00a0He finally gave up in exasperation saying \u201cEverything you say is true dear, it\u2019s *just not physics<\/em>*\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0 Needless to say, I also had no idea what to say to a response like that!! <\/em><\/p>\n

\"Business
The scales of counted and uncounted direct energy demands for operating the model business for the SEA case study.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But that was years ago, and I do see a lot more clearly what keeps people from recognizing how I depart from the common perspective.\u00a0\u00a0 I am, after all, talking about systemic errors in perception.\u00a0 In this case it\u2019s for the world\u2019s standard setting bodies for economic measures. \u00a0\u00a0They’ve\u00a0been thinking our data was the reality, unaware of how much of business system impacts are hidden from view.\u00a0\u00a0 Thinking our information is reality is a problem lots of places. You\u2019re right that if the quite large error found in measuring the impacts of businesses was the same everywhere it\u00a0wouldn’t\u00a0matter at all.\u00a0\u00a0 I think I would have said \u201ccommonly 500%\u201d, just to characterize the scale. \u00a0\u00a0It does vary a good bit, but size really matters here too! Partly it says\u00a0we’ve\u00a0been just asking the wrong question entirely. \u00a0\u00a0If you read a couple pages of the article you know that what businesses have no impact records for is all the services they pay for to operate.\u00a0 Those impacts are roughly proportional to their financial costs, as all costs filter down to being average human consumption.\u00a0 \u00a0So the impacts overlooked were nearly all of the ones incurred by their use of money, having no information about that! In trusting their misinformation they ignored the impacts of the money used to pay for someone to operate the technology, or for someone to build their technology\u2026 really.\u00a0\u00a0 In deciding that the records of energy use for technology were the only energy demands of businesses, they completely ignored that the use of money creates demands for energy uses and other impacts,.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0So, working with such incomplete models and data to develop models for sustainable practices, people have not actually been thinking about the systems for which they were designing. To make money they did what you\u2019d expect. \u00a0\u00a0It\u2019s entirely innocent, I think, but they ended up making small decreases in the small part of the impacts being recorded, making that their selling point, to market projects with increased hidden impacts.\u00a0\u00a0 Making those choices is entirely natural if your motivation is to \u201cmake more with less\u201d, unaware what a huge contradiction \u201cmaking more knowing less\u201d really is . It does make sustainable design unsustainable, though.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0I apologize for being repetitious in offering up things as people sniffed at but ignored them time and again, but sustainability is impossible if we misunderstand what we\u2019re doing so completely. \u00a0\u00a0It helps that you asked. JLH<\/p>\n

__________<\/p>\n

10\/23\/12 \u00a0How Loraine posed the question was<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

Jessie, It seems that, even though\u00a0you’ve\u00a0been posting this paper and its predecessors in a number of threads, you haven\u2019t been able to \u201csell\u201d your concept here. Perhaps it\u2019s because you haven\u2019t tapped into our \u201cdeep values\u201d in a way we can understand, or shown WHY we should care about your method.<\/p>\n

You stated that \u201cvirtually ALL the data on which the sustainabilty community bases its methods on, are off by a full magnitude of scale.\u201d Is it just a constant error, so that it\u00a0doesn’t\u00a0matter anyway? Or are some businesses \u201cworse\u201d than others? And, if so, HOW and WHY are they worse? What is the REAL \u201cbottom line\u201d conclusion that people should draw from the paper? That people\u00a0shouldn’t\u00a0work because they use energy? That wind farms are bad for the world because they use much more energy than people originally thought? Or, alternatively, that it\u2019s good that wind farms are less efficient than people thought because we need to be inefficient because efficiency causes more growth (Jevons Paradox)? How does your paper advance our understanding of what we SHOULD be doing that we\u2019re not, in terms of helping humans learn to co-exist with the rest of nature? If you make those points clearer at the onset, then people will likely better understand why your method might be useful to them\/us. Thanks!<\/p>\n

___________<\/p>\n

10\/26\/12 posting note<\/strong><\/p>\n

If you want it in a much more compact version, it’s that money launders the information we need on the energy uses contributing to our products. \u00a0So, to understand how our world works we need to think of:<\/p>\n

Energy Use = Dollars Paid<\/strong><\/p>\n

The\u00a0raw data that proves it globally, and Jevons’ so called “paradox” of efficiency and growth too, is displayed in the following image also from the SEA study<\/a>. \u00a0If you start with this hard data on total energy use, it help you study the details, keeping you from skipping over the big long chains of energy uses that would be hard to see otherwise.<\/p>\n

\"GDP
Measurements of World GDP, Energy use, Energy Efficiency and CO2 have all steadily followed each other and making each a good "proxy" for the others.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

10\/26\/12 in\u00a0Shining Light on \u201cDark Energy\u201d, part of my “reality math” series,\u00a0I describe how standard measures of business impacts vastly under-count them, and how it has equally misled our theory and practices of\u00a0sustainable design. We’re not counting the consumption required to deliver business services at all, and that’s commonly much larger than the impacts we … Continue reading How mismeasures steer us wrong<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6,7,11,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-among-best-2","category-mail","category-econn","category-research","category-whattodo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2071"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2071\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2426,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2071\/revisions\/2426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}